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lb_leeThat Time The Zombies Invaded
Prompt: Stuff100 'Rain' and H/C Bingo 'shipwrecked'
Summary: Texas is a terrible place to stage a zombie apocalypse.
Notes: An old relegate of the 5 Fanfic Cliches, this is an AU I did purely for fun, and posted purely because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aubergine_pilot requested it.
There were worse places to try and stage a zombie apocalypse, Thomas supposed. Treehouse, for instance. Hell, even some war-stricken country on Earth. Places where everybody was used to the idea that people might try to kill and eat them on a regular basis.
But still, as far as places to swarm with the hordes of the voracious but slowly moving and dumbass undead, you could do way better than Texas, which had some of most lenient gun laws in the country.
Even though firearms weren’t actually all that great against the mobile deceased, unless the bullets were big enough to destroy a lot of the brain on their way out, or small enough to ricochet around inside the skull. No, far more dangerous to the legions of zombies were the sidewalks, or lack thereof. Austin roads were tough enough on creatures that still had the brains to run. Zombies? Not a chance.
In the process of trying to get to and from suburbia, a good chunk of them got mowed down by Chevys, Fords, and other two-ton death machines. Apparently a couple of the frats took to baseball-batting zombies, rather than mailboxes, though Thomas’s parents shook their head and rolled their eyes when they heard.
“Pointless waste of gas,” his mom said. “But at least they’re doing something useful.”
So yeah, Texas was already pretty inhospitable to zombies, all on its own. Plus it had the family Rodriguez in it, and between Dad being an ex-cop, Ma a still-cop, Marcus an army man, and Thomas coming from a two-year stint in Treehouse, they were damn near zombie-proof. The only person who wasn’t in a good position to survive the apocalypse was Christopher, who was still in high school and way better at shooting zombies with a video game controller than with a real gun. But that was okay; through pure luck of the draw, the invasion happened while Marcus was off-duty. Nobody ever came for him, which was just as well, since the Rodriguez family didn’t want to let him go.
So in the wake of societal meltdown and chaos, the Rodriguez family adapted. They fortified the windows and doors of both house and car, stocked up on gas, batteries, and supplies before everything completely collapsed. They lost the power, but they had a cooler, a working camp stove, and one of their phones even managed to work still for a few weeks, before the telephone lines died. Thomas finally learned how to fire a rifle, though Christopher turned out to be the better shot with it. Anyway, better than shooting zombies (which got their attention) was using a long pole, like a broomstick or a pool cue, to just push them away from you. They weren’t that well-balanced; a good shove and they fell over, and then it’d take them a while to get themselves sorted out.
On the whole, it was fairly calm. They were well-stocked, well-prepared, and not prone to panic, and it even turned out that the Morales girls down the street were hardcore survivalists. So they were pretty much set, and anyway, once you got past the whole, ‘hey, that’s old Mrs. Nesbit trying to eat my face,’ thing, zombies lost a lot of their oomph. Seeing your old neighbors dead, rotting and trying to eat animals and claw through doors wasn’t scary anymore. It was just kind of sad.
“Just remember, they aren’t there anymore,” his dad told him one day while training with the rifle. “It’s just the sickness, keeping their bodies going. They’re long gone.”
Thomas could do that. Knowing the Dead-Carrier Beetles helped a lot. As long as he could keep his cool, he was okay, and he knew how to keep his cool. No problem. Easy.
The hard part was not being able to know what was going on with anybody else. Their only contact was the Morales girls and their dad’s old ham radio, and sure, a surprising number of people kept up with ham radio even when everything else went to hell, but not Raige and not M.D. (If they even used the thing, which he doubted.) For all he knew, M.D. had heard about the zombie plague through the Jaunter’s League and simply stayed off-planet to wait it out… though knowing her, he doubted it. The kid had no sense, and she was as fiercely protective of Raige as he was. Thomas wasn’t too worried about her, though. If there was one thing the kid was good at, it was surviving ridiculous stuff like this.
Raige, on the other hand… Thomas loved the guy, but he practically had ‘EAT ME’ written on his forehead. But Vaygo was two states over, and even if Thomas was stupid enough to think going commando was a good idea, no way he could get gas through it. He had to just hope that eventually, the network would start running again and Raige would send him an email or a call.
Thomas volunteered for sentry duty a lot. It meant a lot of long hours sitting up on the roof with the rifle, keeping tabs on zombie activity and any innocent bystanders who might get close to being chewed on, but that was okay. It gave him time to listen, and time to watch, and time to hope.
Weeks passed. Then a month. They never came.
One chilly autumn night, while Thomas watched the stars, wrapped in his Longhorns blanket with the rifle in his lap, Marcus swung up on the roof from the tree at the attic window. He held a mug of hot cocoa.
“You should come down,” he said, giving Thomas the mug.
Thomas shrugged. “It’s cool. Nothing else to do, and the view is great.”
That, at least, was true. Now that the power had been cut, there were no streetlights, no office buildings lit up, no light at all except every once in a long while, the headlights of a light motorbike or a fortified car going out for supplies. Thomas’s eyes had long since adjusted to the dark, and above him, the sky was black velvet brushed with silver.
“They ain’t going to come here in the middle of the night in October, man,” Marcus said, getting comfortable on the roof next to him.
Thomas just shrugged again and sipped the cocoa. It burned his tongue. Below them, a few lonely zombies shuffled around, looking for road kill. One had been trying to walk through a mailbox for about ten minutes, and it finally figured things out and changed course. If Raige were here, he’d probably make some bad pun about it changing corpse…
“You think they’re okay?” Thomas asked.
Marcus tilted his head. “You know them better than I do.”
Thomas was silent for a while. “I don’t know,” He said finally, and gulped down more cocoa, too fast so he wouldn’t need an excuse for his eyes watering.
Marcus nodded. “Maybe. But you don’t know.” He clapped Thomas on the shoulder. “Go to bed, bro. I’ll take sentry, huh?”
Thomas nodded, gave him the rifle, and took the cocoa mug to the tree that led down to the attic window. Underneath, a zombie looked at him wistfully, like it was hoping he’d somehow manage to fall off a branch ten inches thick.
“Bug off,” he told it, and threw the mug at it. It bounced off the zombie’s head with a hollow thunk. The zombie yiped, but it didn’t leave.
Thomas sighed, climbed through the window, and went to bed.
Winter came on, and things got a little tougher. The heat didn’t work anymore, of course, so they did a lot of cooking with the stove, bundled up together under blankets. Thomas began to think that maybe neither M.D. nor Raige would ever come. M.D. had her jaunt watch; surely she would’ve been able to pop in and out before anything happened… but if so, why hadn’t she shown? He stopped doing sentry duty. He started sleeping more. His family noticed and tried to keep him occupied, but his heart just wasn’t in it.
Then, one frigid night as the rain poured down and the family tried to sleep through the howling wind, there came a pounding on the door and general sounds of commotion, incomprehensible over the storm noises.
Now, the zombies had started getting a little smarter. They’d generally accepted that things like trees and mailboxes couldn’t be walked through, and that roads meant cars meant crunch. But they didn’t ever knock. Scratched a little sometimes, and gnawed, but never knocked.
Nobody had to tell him. Thomas grabbed the rifle and dashed up to the attic, where he shoved his head out the window.
And there was M.D., lit up like a human disco ball as she pitched lightning. It seemed to be working, but the glow was also bringing the zombies on like a beacon, and judging by the sporadic flicker over her arms, she was tiring fast. She was guarding Raige, whose arm was in a sling, and at his back was Raige’s dad. He was still in his business suit, but it was looking a bit worse for the wear, but he had a pool cue in his hand and was using it pretty well. Biff was bracing them, armed with a crowbar; it was him who was pounding on the door.
“Hi Thomas!” M.D. shouted as she zapped a zombie. “I’m immune to zombie plague!”
“Let us in!” Biff shouted. “Fuck is wrong with you?”
And Thomas grinned and spoke English for the first time in a month and a half. “You would survive the zombie apocalypse, asshole,” he shouted, and yelled for his folks to let them in. Then he shouldered the rifle and started picking off zombies.
Prompt: Stuff100 'Rain' and H/C Bingo 'shipwrecked'
Summary: Texas is a terrible place to stage a zombie apocalypse.
Notes: An old relegate of the 5 Fanfic Cliches, this is an AU I did purely for fun, and posted purely because
aubergine_pilot requested it.There were worse places to try and stage a zombie apocalypse, Thomas supposed. Treehouse, for instance. Hell, even some war-stricken country on Earth. Places where everybody was used to the idea that people might try to kill and eat them on a regular basis.
But still, as far as places to swarm with the hordes of the voracious but slowly moving and dumbass undead, you could do way better than Texas, which had some of most lenient gun laws in the country.
Even though firearms weren’t actually all that great against the mobile deceased, unless the bullets were big enough to destroy a lot of the brain on their way out, or small enough to ricochet around inside the skull. No, far more dangerous to the legions of zombies were the sidewalks, or lack thereof. Austin roads were tough enough on creatures that still had the brains to run. Zombies? Not a chance.
In the process of trying to get to and from suburbia, a good chunk of them got mowed down by Chevys, Fords, and other two-ton death machines. Apparently a couple of the frats took to baseball-batting zombies, rather than mailboxes, though Thomas’s parents shook their head and rolled their eyes when they heard.
“Pointless waste of gas,” his mom said. “But at least they’re doing something useful.”
So yeah, Texas was already pretty inhospitable to zombies, all on its own. Plus it had the family Rodriguez in it, and between Dad being an ex-cop, Ma a still-cop, Marcus an army man, and Thomas coming from a two-year stint in Treehouse, they were damn near zombie-proof. The only person who wasn’t in a good position to survive the apocalypse was Christopher, who was still in high school and way better at shooting zombies with a video game controller than with a real gun. But that was okay; through pure luck of the draw, the invasion happened while Marcus was off-duty. Nobody ever came for him, which was just as well, since the Rodriguez family didn’t want to let him go.
So in the wake of societal meltdown and chaos, the Rodriguez family adapted. They fortified the windows and doors of both house and car, stocked up on gas, batteries, and supplies before everything completely collapsed. They lost the power, but they had a cooler, a working camp stove, and one of their phones even managed to work still for a few weeks, before the telephone lines died. Thomas finally learned how to fire a rifle, though Christopher turned out to be the better shot with it. Anyway, better than shooting zombies (which got their attention) was using a long pole, like a broomstick or a pool cue, to just push them away from you. They weren’t that well-balanced; a good shove and they fell over, and then it’d take them a while to get themselves sorted out.
On the whole, it was fairly calm. They were well-stocked, well-prepared, and not prone to panic, and it even turned out that the Morales girls down the street were hardcore survivalists. So they were pretty much set, and anyway, once you got past the whole, ‘hey, that’s old Mrs. Nesbit trying to eat my face,’ thing, zombies lost a lot of their oomph. Seeing your old neighbors dead, rotting and trying to eat animals and claw through doors wasn’t scary anymore. It was just kind of sad.
“Just remember, they aren’t there anymore,” his dad told him one day while training with the rifle. “It’s just the sickness, keeping their bodies going. They’re long gone.”
Thomas could do that. Knowing the Dead-Carrier Beetles helped a lot. As long as he could keep his cool, he was okay, and he knew how to keep his cool. No problem. Easy.
The hard part was not being able to know what was going on with anybody else. Their only contact was the Morales girls and their dad’s old ham radio, and sure, a surprising number of people kept up with ham radio even when everything else went to hell, but not Raige and not M.D. (If they even used the thing, which he doubted.) For all he knew, M.D. had heard about the zombie plague through the Jaunter’s League and simply stayed off-planet to wait it out… though knowing her, he doubted it. The kid had no sense, and she was as fiercely protective of Raige as he was. Thomas wasn’t too worried about her, though. If there was one thing the kid was good at, it was surviving ridiculous stuff like this.
Raige, on the other hand… Thomas loved the guy, but he practically had ‘EAT ME’ written on his forehead. But Vaygo was two states over, and even if Thomas was stupid enough to think going commando was a good idea, no way he could get gas through it. He had to just hope that eventually, the network would start running again and Raige would send him an email or a call.
Thomas volunteered for sentry duty a lot. It meant a lot of long hours sitting up on the roof with the rifle, keeping tabs on zombie activity and any innocent bystanders who might get close to being chewed on, but that was okay. It gave him time to listen, and time to watch, and time to hope.
Weeks passed. Then a month. They never came.
One chilly autumn night, while Thomas watched the stars, wrapped in his Longhorns blanket with the rifle in his lap, Marcus swung up on the roof from the tree at the attic window. He held a mug of hot cocoa.
“You should come down,” he said, giving Thomas the mug.
Thomas shrugged. “It’s cool. Nothing else to do, and the view is great.”
That, at least, was true. Now that the power had been cut, there were no streetlights, no office buildings lit up, no light at all except every once in a long while, the headlights of a light motorbike or a fortified car going out for supplies. Thomas’s eyes had long since adjusted to the dark, and above him, the sky was black velvet brushed with silver.
“They ain’t going to come here in the middle of the night in October, man,” Marcus said, getting comfortable on the roof next to him.
Thomas just shrugged again and sipped the cocoa. It burned his tongue. Below them, a few lonely zombies shuffled around, looking for road kill. One had been trying to walk through a mailbox for about ten minutes, and it finally figured things out and changed course. If Raige were here, he’d probably make some bad pun about it changing corpse…
“You think they’re okay?” Thomas asked.
Marcus tilted his head. “You know them better than I do.”
Thomas was silent for a while. “I don’t know,” He said finally, and gulped down more cocoa, too fast so he wouldn’t need an excuse for his eyes watering.
Marcus nodded. “Maybe. But you don’t know.” He clapped Thomas on the shoulder. “Go to bed, bro. I’ll take sentry, huh?”
Thomas nodded, gave him the rifle, and took the cocoa mug to the tree that led down to the attic window. Underneath, a zombie looked at him wistfully, like it was hoping he’d somehow manage to fall off a branch ten inches thick.
“Bug off,” he told it, and threw the mug at it. It bounced off the zombie’s head with a hollow thunk. The zombie yiped, but it didn’t leave.
Thomas sighed, climbed through the window, and went to bed.
Winter came on, and things got a little tougher. The heat didn’t work anymore, of course, so they did a lot of cooking with the stove, bundled up together under blankets. Thomas began to think that maybe neither M.D. nor Raige would ever come. M.D. had her jaunt watch; surely she would’ve been able to pop in and out before anything happened… but if so, why hadn’t she shown? He stopped doing sentry duty. He started sleeping more. His family noticed and tried to keep him occupied, but his heart just wasn’t in it.
Then, one frigid night as the rain poured down and the family tried to sleep through the howling wind, there came a pounding on the door and general sounds of commotion, incomprehensible over the storm noises.
Now, the zombies had started getting a little smarter. They’d generally accepted that things like trees and mailboxes couldn’t be walked through, and that roads meant cars meant crunch. But they didn’t ever knock. Scratched a little sometimes, and gnawed, but never knocked.
Nobody had to tell him. Thomas grabbed the rifle and dashed up to the attic, where he shoved his head out the window.
And there was M.D., lit up like a human disco ball as she pitched lightning. It seemed to be working, but the glow was also bringing the zombies on like a beacon, and judging by the sporadic flicker over her arms, she was tiring fast. She was guarding Raige, whose arm was in a sling, and at his back was Raige’s dad. He was still in his business suit, but it was looking a bit worse for the wear, but he had a pool cue in his hand and was using it pretty well. Biff was bracing them, armed with a crowbar; it was him who was pounding on the door.
“Hi Thomas!” M.D. shouted as she zapped a zombie. “I’m immune to zombie plague!”
“Let us in!” Biff shouted. “Fuck is wrong with you?”
And Thomas grinned and spoke English for the first time in a month and a half. “You would survive the zombie apocalypse, asshole,” he shouted, and yelled for his folks to let them in. Then he shouldered the rifle and started picking off zombies.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-11 03:21 am (UTC)That was at the end. About 2-4pp past the beginning is when I blurted, "Oh, it's _Thomas_!" and scrolled back to reread with that in mind.
Possible typos:
• The zombie yiped, but it didn’t leave.
-> yipped ?
• Jaunter’s League
-> Jaunters' League ?
no subject
Date: 2014-03-12 01:30 am (UTC)Ohhhhhh NOOOOOO.
My horror is threefold:
1. That I made such an elemental grammatical mistake.
2. That I have been making that same mistake FOR OVER TEN YEARS, meaning...
3. Fixing it would require not only a fair brain-lurch, but manually going through the 50+ Infinity Smashed stories I've posted and either manually fixing all of its instances, or do search-replace which then requires me to manually replace ALL THE FORMATTING.
OHHHHH NOOOOOOO
*goes to curl in corner and cry*
no subject
Date: 2014-03-12 03:56 am (UTC)There, there. I'm sure most people never noticed it at all.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-12 03:41 pm (UTC)--Rogan
no subject
Date: 2014-03-12 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-01 07:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-14 10:55 am (UTC)